bush signed into law a federal law called the protection of the lawful commerce act. you know you have a lot of power in congress when you don't even have to come up with a snappy acronym to get it enacted. it was enacted in 2005 and a tough speech today the enormous protection for these kind of lawsuits to be whether they were in conjunction with them or not. they gave them a very broad immunity from liability. the kind of immunity that essentially no other product manufacturer in the united states enjoys. they didn't provide people that were harmed with any kind of alternative compensation scheme and they even said that there but retroactively applied to the pending lawsuits that had to be dismissed and in fact they were and as a result the public health function of lawsuits and litigation in general, something that steve taught us about for many years was eroded. there were some relatively narrow exceptions to the plcaa that allowed the lawsuits to proceed nevertheless. and new york city took advantage of one of those exceptions. one of those exceptions is the basi